American Realist Painter, 1844-1916. Thomas Cowperthwait Eakins (July 25, 1844 ?C June 25, 1916) was a realist painter, photographer, sculptor, and fine arts educator. He is widely acknowledged to be one of the most important artists in American art history. For the length of his professional career, from the early 1870s until his health began to fail some forty years later, Eakins worked exactingly from life, choosing as his subject the people of his hometown of Philadelphia. He painted several hundred portraits, usually of friends, family members, or prominent people in the arts, sciences, medicine, and clergy. Taken en masse, the portraits offer an overview of the intellectual life of Philadelphia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; individually, they are incisive depictions of thinking persons. As well, Eakins produced a number of large paintings which brought the portrait out of the drawing room and into the offices, streets, parks, rivers, arenas, and surgical amphitheaters of his city. These active outdoor venues allowed him to paint the subject which most inspired him: the nude or lightly clad figure in motion. In the process he could model the forms of the body in full sunlight, and create images of deep space utilizing his studies in perspective. No less important in Eakins' life was his work as a teacher. As an instructor he was a highly influential presence in American art. The difficulties which beset him as an artist seeking to paint the portrait and figure realistically were paralleled and even amplified in his career as an educator, where behavioral and sexual scandals truncated his success and damaged his reputation. Eakins also took a keen interest in the new technologies of motion photography, a field in which he is now seen as an innovator. Eakins was a controversial figure whose work received little by way of official recognition during his lifetime. Since his death, he has been celebrated by American art historians as "the strongest, most profound realist in nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century American art".  Related Paintings of Thomas Eakins :. | Max Schmitt a l'aviron | Portrait of Dr. Edward Anthony Spitzka | Addie | The Gross Clinic | Self Portrait hbn |
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George Gardner Symons
1861-1930
Julius Paulsen
Danish, 1860-1940 Danish painter. He studied at the Kongelige Akademi for de Skenne Kunster, Copenhagen (1879-82), but found the training there uninspired and soon attached himself to more radical artists such as Peder Severin Kreyer and Laurits Regner Tuxen. A turning-point in his career came in 1885 when, with Viggo Johansen, he went to Paris. On the way they visited Amsterdam, where the art of Rembrandt made a great impact on Paulsen; in Paris he showed interest in Courbet and Monet. From 1886 his time was shared between landscape, figure and portrait painting. His first landscape, From the Village of Ry (1886; Copenhagen, Hirschsprungske Saml.), is an early example of his personal blend of Romanticism and Symbolism; it shows a golden sunset colouring the houses and gardens of the small village. His View from the Harbour after Sunset (1891; Copenhagen, Hirschsprungske Saml.) has much in common with Monet, the Copenhagen skyline barely discernible through a deep blue and iridescent atmosphere. A later visit to Paris inspired such sunlit townscapes as Under Pont des Arts in Paris, Midday Sun (1919; Copenhagen, Stat. Mus. Kst), the shimmering, sketchy surface of which is dominated by fresh blues and greens; the painting incorporates a favourite Impressionist motif, the curved filigree of the iron bridge, which both frames the scene and lends it tension.
Walt Louderback
American, 1887-1941